University of Portsmouth, School of Languages and Area Studies
Park Building, King Henry 1 Street, Portsmouth PO1 2DZ
Tutor:
Szilvia Papp
Office:
Room: 3.11
Tel:
(023) 92 84 6024
E-mail:
szilvia.papp@port.ac.uk
3 February 2000
Linguistic Description 2: Above the sentence
Portfolio: What is involved in completing your weekly task sheets?
2002/2003
The purpose of the weekly project (which will eventually build up to your full portfolio) is to
build up practical skills in investigating a language that you do not entirely know (or know very
little of) and describing it linguistically. Each week you will be given a practical task sheet and
these task sheets will build up into a dossier of work by the end of the course (in other words, you
will be assembling your portfolio). Your are well advised to choose one of the languages you are
studying at this department (German, Russian, Spanish, French, or Italian, but not English) as the
support materials and my and other staff members’ expertise are most extensive in these
languages. Alternatively, you may be interested in finding out about a language which is not even
taught at Portsmouth, such as Arabic, Japanese, Korean, a Chinese variety, Malay, Thai, Greek,
Turkish, an African language, or Hungarian, for example.
You will need to find an informant who is the native speaker of your chosen language.Your
informant may be proficient in a distinctive dialect of the language (rather than the standard form,
if there is one). Be aware of this from the start and make sure that the description you build up is
consistently of this same variety. Please note that we will not accept dialects of English (such as
Scots, Hiberno-English, or Singapore English, for example) as the subject of this project.
For this purpose your informant will need to be capable of telling you what you will need to find
out about the new language every week (hence, a native speaker is deemed the best). Informants
do not need to have any linguistic knowledge at all, but you will have to explain to them, in
simple terms, what you need to know and convert the information you get into linguistic
terminology in your discussion.
It is up to you to find your own informant, either from among your classmates or from elsewhere
(for example you might be sharing a house with someone who speaks the language you are
interested in). Remember that you will be going back to this person every week for 10 weeks, for
perhaps half an hour each time, to ask him or her something different. You should explain this
from the start and make sure that this person is willing to continue to help you throughout the
course. You might like to offer him or her some service in return (information on your own native
language, a meal, proofreading, etc. but not money!). If you lose contact with your informant
during the course for some reason, you will have to find a new one, preferably in the same dialect
of the same language.
I hope that you will enjoy the course and will learn something about the way language works that
will be of use to you in your language learning in your studies with us and independently in the
future.